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In late February, not long after President Donald Trump took office again, around six hundred people gathered in Washington, D.C., for a “DOGE appreciation party.” The event was at the penthouse of the Pierce School, a historic building named after President Franklin Pierce. (These days, the person presiding over the penthouse is Brock Pierce, no relation, a crypto tycoon and a former child actor who starred in the 1992 film “The Mighty Ducks.”) The room was full of “big boobs and big ideas,” Kelly Chapman, a contributing writer for the conservative magazine The Spectator, later wrote on Substack. Damir Marusic, a Washington Post editor, recalled overhearing “a group of young men eagerly talking about the Roman Empire.” Before the party, the invitation had made its way to Reddit, and protesters appeared at the event. Outside, they chanted, “Fascists out of D.C.!”

The party was organized by Nick Allen, a thirty-two-year-old co-founder of a fintech company. For the past few years, Allen has become influential by creating new social spaces, especially for young people on the right. His most well-known venture is Sovereign House, an event venue in Lower Manhattan, where he and his friends hosted magazine-issue launches, film screenings, debates, and plays, as well as good old-fashioned parties. The space, which Allen founded in 2023, became a gathering spot for a cross-section of Gen Z-ers: crypto bros, young religious people, internet posters, literary types. Allen’s friends describe him as a Gatsby-esque figure. “Everyone says they know Nick,” one young high-level Trump Administration official told me. “But only a few people really know Nick.”

After Trump was reëlected, several Sovereign House attendees took jobs in the Administration, including in the West Wing, the Justice Department, and various other federal agencies. “Nick is in this weird role where he’s kind of like an embassy in New York for us,” the young Trump official told me—Sovereign House “was where you would go on the weekend to clear your head.” Bart Hutchins, the co-owner and chef of Butterworth’s, a Trumpworld hangout in D.C., said that “during Inauguration week, the Venn diagram of Butterworth’s and Sov could have been a circle.”

“Lotta buzz about your event in the West Wing today,” a friend texted Allen, before the DOGE party. Around 1 A.M., when the party was going strong, Allen noticed a woman trying to clear an area upstairs in the penthouse. “I was, like, ‘What’s going on?’ ” Allen recalled. “She said that Elon was outside.” (Allen didn’t see Elon Musk at the party, and he never figured out whether the rumor of his presence had been true.) Allen generally preferred not to have politicians at Sovereign House events—“it blows the place up,” he told me—but it wasn’t uncommon for notable conservative figures, including Ann Coulter, Christopher Rufo, and the Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, to come through.

Trump’s first few months in office felt like a victory lap for people on the right, who believed that they had defeated wokeism and won both the election and the culture. Prominent Democrats started retreating from identity politics; Musk waved around a chainsaw onstage at CPAC. MAGA was having a blast. And yet the triumphalism seems to be receding. In New York City, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani just won the mayoral election. Nationally, the conservative movement has been eating itself alive over various controversies, such as Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Capitalizing on backlash is one thing. Creating a long-lasting culture shift on the right is much harder.

Sovereign House was a product of the pandemic era, when many people on the right felt cooped up, censored, and marginalized. Now Allen is launching an event space and social club called Reign, in the same neighborhood, which will test whether the restive energy of the past few years can be channelled into something sustainable. “This part of the right has a lot of energy and talent, but it doesn’t have a lot of organization and competence,” Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, told me. It’s also lacking in cultural spaces—places for making friends and exchanging ideas, separate from the business of electing politicians. Allen said that the scene he’s cultivating is “for people who want to build again.”

The landscape for young, right-wing ferment in New York is Dimes Square, a micro-neighborhood in Manhattan between Chinatown and the Lower East Side. During COVID, it emerged as a hangout for anti-woke, anti-lockdown hipsters. Transient institutions sprung up, such as Beckett’s—a performance venue that was really just the townhouse where Beckett Rosset, the fiftysomething son of the avant-garde publisher Barney Rosset, lived. Matt Gasda, a writer who staged one of his plays, called “Dimes Square,” at Beckett’s, first met Allen there. “Maybe other people were seeing a place to party,” Gasda said. “Nick clearly saw a model.”

Beckett’s started to wind down in the spring of 2023. Around that time, Allen launched Sovereign House, which hosted events with a similarly artsy profile. Cassidy Grady, a dancer and an actress, staged a series called “Confessions,” in which writers read fictional stories they had spun up out of anonymous admissions of wrongdoing. An indie film company called One Man Army hosted screenings, running together low-budget short films on themes like horror-comedy to create one long, trippy feature. “I’ve gone to Strand events, with big names speaking, and there’s twenty people in the audience,” Noah Kumin, a novelist and the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine called The Mars Review of Books, told me. “And I’ve been to events at Beckett’s and Sovereign House with people reading from self-published books, and it’s packed from wall to wall.”

Sovereign House wasn’t explicitly partisan; Allen wanted the space to be intellectually capacious. He picked the name Sovereign House to signal independence from any kind of authority. And yet, the name also seemed to nod at ideas that have been gaining currency in niche right-wing circles, like establishing an American monarchy or creating independent city-states. Allen hired Matthew Easton, an aggressive poster on X, to curate speakers and circulate the events to minor internet celebrities. Elena Velez, a designer who makes, in her words, “anti-fragile fashion”—lots of corsets and leather, a collaboration with OnlyFans—described Easton as “a true visionary who found a way to create all sorts of productive social friction between the different freaks and geeks du jour.” Allen and Easton viewed Sovereign House differently. “In many ways, Matt felt like a party promoter,” one twentysomething Sovereign House regular, who asked to be identified by his X handle, @coldhealing, told me. “Nick saw that as adjacent to his goals: to make this thing cool.” Allen’s vision was for something like a nineteen-fifties social club, but for the online generation. Although Sovereign House wasn’t uniformly young, part of its appeal was that members of Gen Z—spoon-fed screens as children, immersed in cancel culture as teens, and stuck in COVID lockdowns as they entered young adulthood—could discover the freedom of a social world rooted in real life.

I spoke with a young man in his twenties named Joe, who moved to New York in 2023. He had recently left a D.C. seminary, after deciding not to become a Catholic priest. One day, a friend invited him to an event at Sovereign House. A bartender served drinks from behind a vintage hotel desk; a phone booth sat nearby. “What is this place?” Joe wondered.

Some of the guests were aligned with the new tech right, or with the crypto world. This is the world that Allen came out of: after graduating from high school, in 2012, he did some volunteer work for Namecoin, a blockchain project associated with the late internet activist Aaron Swartz, and helped launch a new cryptocurrency. Sovereign House also had a strong religious current. “If you’re a crypto guy, you’d be, like, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of Catholics here,’ ” Joe said. On Sundays, a group of Sovereign House regulars would go to the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral for the 7 P.M. service, formally known as the young-adult Mass but colloquially understood as the Hot Mass. (Allen is stubbornly Protestant, despite attending Mass with his girlfriend.) Old St. Pat’s was about as trad as you could get without going to Latin Mass: singing in Latin, a rail where Mass-goers kneel to receive the Eucharist. Afterward, the group would go out drinking together. “People are looking for meaning,” Joe said. “They’re looking for an identity.” He met people at Sovereign House who’d started their religious journey after messaging with people on X, or in tandem with their political transformation. “I genuinely believe God works through all of that,” he said.

At Sovereign House, Allen and Easton curated a list of heterodox, and sometimes controversial, speakers. Some were on the left, such as Norman Finkelstein, the anti-Zionist academic. Many were on the right. Steve Sailer, a writer, stopped by on his book tour; he’s a proponent of human-biodiversity theory, which suggests that genetic differences such as race are correlated with group-wide differences in traits like intelligence—what some would call race science. Curtis Yarvin, an influential right-wing blogger, also promoted his book there. The right-wing X personality Raw Egg Nationalist hosted a screening of a Tucker Carlson documentary about the decline in testosterone levels among American men. There were also some surprising pairings, such as Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative Catholic who did a book talk with Bhaskhar Sunkara, a democratic socialist who has led both The Nation and Jacobin.

“There was something freeing about being in a place where everyone was a little bit deemed unorthodox,” Caroline Downey, a National Review writer, told me. Many Conservative Gen Z-ers were high schoolers during the first Trump era. “If you were interested in right-wing politics, you were the weird kid in school—super far right, Nazi, crazy,” the young Trump Administration official told me. “We all kind of experienced the same bullshit. There’s this collective hate for everything we had to go through.” Sovereign House was high-trust—a place where they belonged.

One evening this spring, around fifty people milled around Sovereign House dressed in formal attire. They were there for a meeting of the James Duane Society, a literary-debating group. A framed portrait of James Duane, New York City’s first mayor following the Revolution, sat on a small table at the front of the room, the way a photograph of Grandma might be displayed at her funeral. Duane was chosen as the society’s namesake because, as Allen put it, “he was, like, based.” (A 1938 biography describes Duane, one of America’s Founding Fathers, as a man “opposed to hasty social revolution.”)

Literary-debating societies are a bit like high-school debate groups, but with everyone LARPing as members of the House of Lords. That night’s topic was “Resolved: Myth Is Superior to History,” a discussion about how history is recorded and what gets remembered. Some debaters used nicknames; Allen’s was Gentleman from the Sovereign State. (“It’s like prison names!” he said.) Regrettably, there was no apparent time limit on the speeches. Every now and then, a sergeant-at-arms brandishing a sword told chattering attendees to shut up. Several other swords were hidden around Sovereign House; Allen wasn’t sure how many. One stayed by the door. “Sometimes homeless people try to get in,” Allen said, and “someone will take it and poke ’em in the chest.” (Allen later clarified that it was only one time, and that the sword never touched anyone, and that it remained sheathed.)

Later, I asked Allen why all the debaters, and most of the attendees, were men. “I think guys like to debate more than girls,” he said. “They like the structure.” He went on, “The girls are here for more aesthetic reasons—they’re with a guy, they’re interested in the spectacle, they want to dress up.” He pointed out notable people in attendance: Dasha Nekrasova, an actress and a co-host of the “Red Scare” podcast. A lawyer who had recently got a job in the Justice Department. A guy who worked at Palantir, the software company co-founded by Peter Thiel.

Every other month or so, the James Duane Society convenes for a toasting session, where the members sometimes sing tunes from a custom songbook. The titles range from “America the Beautiful” to the apartheid-era South African national anthem. There are also satirical original songs, composed by the society’s members. Take “Trump Rest You Merry, Patriots,” set to the tune of the Christmas carol:

And so we stormed the Capitol

That January day

Turned over the election,

Hanged Mike Pence on our way.

Now Trump shall reign forever

With liberals kept at bay!

O tidings of Trump-fort and joy . . .

Allen told me that these songs are written as part of the debates, and that the authors may not actually agree with the lyrics. This particular song was submitted for “Resolved: The Mob Should Rule.” (The resolution failed.)

During the history-versus-myth debate, participants effortlessly toggled between provocative jokes and earnest argument. One speaker contended that myths are more useful than history, and that they define our politics. He gave the example of fire trucks spraying Black children with water during civil-rights protests—at which people laughed and stomped. Jokes were made about women and all academics being “stupid and gay or whatever.” At one point, an attendee in the back started shouting, “JEW! JEW! JEW!” (Another member told me this may have been a reference to an Alex Jones meme.) A speaker was chastised for not wearing a tie and was offered a loaner: what Allen referred to as the “autism tie,” decorated with brightly colored puzzle pieces that are used as a symbol by the autism community. Allen described the group’s taste for provocation as a meaningful exercise in trust-building: “Prove you’re not a cop. Do this line of cocaine.” It was meta-satire, he said—a knowing performance of lib-trolling among friends, which allowed them to have more authentic conversations. Matt Gasda, the playwright, formed a different impression after visiting a few times: people there weren’t “just testing the system of Sovereign House—whether it’s free-speech absolutist, whatever. They’re also testing to see if people will like them even if their weird, dark impulses come out.”

One of Allen’s goals, in taking a bunch of people from the internet and encouraging them to foster an in-person community, was to transcend the grievance culture that’s so pervasive on social media—the outrage and mockery directed toward the left. Still, outlandish offensiveness was the local dialect, even in real life. “There’s a highly combustible, cathartic, and reactionary energy that has been bubbling up in young people over the last few years,” Elena Velez, the fashion designer, told me. “I’d go as far as calling Sovereign House the epicenter of that exhaust valve.”

The simplest way to visualize the generational shift in American politics is through voting patterns. In 2020, fifty-six per cent of men aged eighteen to twenty-nine voted for Joe Biden, according to an analysis by a Tufts University research center. In 2024, fifty-six per cent of men in this age group voted for Trump. Young women favored Kamala Harris, but they also moved right, by eight percentage points.

Sovereign House captures and complicates this trend. Some of the cohort are, “like, Zoomers for Trump,” Allen told me. (Born in 1992, he’s technically a millennial, but he told me that he has a “Gen Z soul.”) However, Allen also described voting as “a meme” that co-opts people into preëxisting political identities, and he did not vote in the 2024 election. “We love the fact that we have this strongman who makes us laugh,” he said. “But we understand the bit, and we’re not going to be sucked into this.”

Sometimes it seemed like Allen was trying to have it both ways: he rejected political classification while cultivating a proximity to power. Before the 2024 election, Trump made a visit to Pubkey, a Bitcoin-themed bar in the city owned by one of Allen’s friends. The owner thanked Allen afterward; he had met a former White House staffer, who helped make the visit happen, at Sovereign House. In November, Sovereign House held an election watch party, co-hosted by Polymarket, a crypto-based betting market, and Remilia, an internet collective known for making N.F.T.s of an anime cartoon known as Milady. Guests ate McDonald’s, and a Trump impersonator showed up. Attendees wore MAGA hats, which were typically banned at Sovereign House. (When GQ wrote about the party and included a photograph of a girl in a micro-bikini and a MAGA hat, Allen was chagrined. “Extremely low class,” he told me.)

Allen does have genuine political beliefs; he is deeply interested, for example, in efforts to reindustrialize America and make it more competitive. He runs a nonprofit called the Frontier Foundation, which advocates for “freedom cities,” or zones with minimal federal regulation that would allow companies to more freely develop technologies—beta-testing drones with more flexible regulation from the Federal Aviation Administration, for example. (The foundation used to share an address with the Conservative Partnership Institute, an influential Trumpworld organization, though Allen said that his lawyer chose that address, and that the groups have no connection.) Trump promoted freedom cities on the campaign trail, and Allen claimed that people in his camp had met with the Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum. He also said he sees these efforts as not particularly partisan.

Over time, Sovereign House came to be not just a hang-out spot, but also a network of like-minded people, some of whom have gone on to exert their influence in politics and media. A generation ago, those who wanted status in the conservative movement would go to Yale or Harvard, or work at the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s a way to get around those usual gatekeeping institutions,” Max Bodach, who works in tech policy at a center-right think tank, told me. “You just have to go talk to Nick.”

Some critics have used a different word to describe Sovereign House—one that’s also often aimed at the Trump Administration. “There’s definitely a lot of ideas that would be accurately defined as ‘fascist’ that are discussed at Sovereign House,” Mike Crumplar, a Substack writer adjacent to the scene, told me. “You’re not really going to get Black Shirts there. You’re not getting the Proud Boys. You’re getting this archetypal failed-artist hipster who is an opportunist and sees this moment of opportunity for their own personal advancement.” Nick Dove, a photographer and a writer who spent time at Sovereign House, said that many of his friends believed the attendees “were aiding and abetting the takeover of the American government by the New Right and by Trump”—that they were “right-wing fascists who were very reactionary in their social beliefs, particularly when it came to women, or minorities, or people of different sexual orientations.”

Last year, Benjamin Teitelbaum, an ethnographer at the University of Colorado Boulder who follows right-wing movements, approached Allen about the scene at Sovereign House, and Allen invited him to give a talk. Teitelbaum told me that what he saw there felt politically significant. He was struck by how the right is making inroads with demographic groups typically associated with the left: city dwellers, art lovers, young people. “You need to have scenes. And you need to be having fun,” he said. “This is the sort of thing one would need to do to build a lasting political cause.”

Teitelbaum thinks people who write off Sovereign House as “fascist” are making a mistake. “What we’re doing is singing a little lullaby to ourselves,” he said. “We’re absolved of any responsibility to learn anything new.”

In the spring, Sovereign House came to an end. Allen’s lease had run out. Luckily, he had already started scheming his next project. He had secured a long-term space nearby, for a new venue he would call Reign. Sovereign House had rarely charged attendees for events; Allen said he had bankrolled the place. In contrast, Reign would be financed through a membership model—an annual fee of three thousand dollars. “I’m not trying to make money,” Allen told me. “I’m trying to make this sustainable for the next fifteen to thirty years.”

Another reason for moving to a more selective model was Sovereign House’s problem with kooks and outright racists. A lot of the internet personalities who showed up “remained in character,” Gasda, the playwright, told me. “There’s a pleasure in reifying your own online performance—finding a space where you can be the frog guy IRL.” Cassidy Grady moved her series “Confessions” to KGB, a Soviet-themed bar in the East Village. (Allen told me he had come to feel that the content was blasphemous—the event was on Sundays. Grady said she began to feel “a pathetic sense of right-wing desperation from the Sovereign House-guy types which made them uncool and pathetic.”) Eventually, Gasda began politely declining invitations to Sovereign House events. “Whatever Sovereign House was, it just didn’t feel worth it to me,” he said.

Allen suggested that his critics were happy to go to Sovereign House when they thought it was cool, and only distanced themselves to protect their own clout. He also said there had always been outer limits to who was welcome at the venue. Some fans of right-wing figures like Nick Fuentes “hated Sovereign House for not being antisemitic enough,” Matthew Easton told me. Allen said he went to great lengths to keep genuinely bad people from coming back. Still, when I visited Sovereign House this spring, as Allen was cleaning out the space, a plastic plate on which someone had scribbled the words “nigger” and “faggot” fell out of a recess in the brick wall. Allen grabbed the plate, broke it in half, and whisked it into the trash. He insisted that it must have been left by an agitator.

Reign is a chance for a reset, a shift to a more boundaried, gatekept structure. Some former Sovereign House regulars are skeptical that Reign can work. “It’s hard for me to see the true democratic spirit that made Sov fun surviving through a membership fee,” the X user @coldhealing told me. (Easton, for his part, wants to start a Sovereign House-type venue in L.A.) Allen said that, in recruiting for Reign, he’s most interested in potential members’ output—whether they’ve founded a company, say, or written for a publication he admires. He’s not interested in Reign becoming a social club for the New York G.O.P. “There’s much better ways to change the world than doing it through the vector of politics,” he said. “If you’ve worked for a campaign, automatically not allowed.” Young Republicans? “Banned.” (Later: “A soft ban.”)

Allen’s goal is for Reign to feel timeless. He found a rusty-looking, twenty-foot storefront sign that he claims had been made for A24’s upcoming historical drama “Marty Supreme,” and had a friend repaint it with the name “REIGN.” Contractors built custom shelves, installed incandescent lights, and erected cloistered booths where guests can enjoy a drink. Downstairs, in the library, there’s a stage for performances and talks and a pull-down screen for films. Allen collects artifacts like old books and religious tracts, which he will incorporate into exhibits in an upstairs gallery space open to the public. Roughly five hundred people cycled through a recent open house, which featured a display on the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal public-works program. The club will officially open in January.

If Sovereign House was a reactionary “exhaust valve,” as Velez put it, Reign is Allen’s attempt to build something productive, a place that facilitates startups, new ideas, and lifelong friendships. “A marriage—that’s a celebration,” he said. “It’s a remnant of the social contract that has disappeared. I want to foster those things.”

The first night that Joe, the young man who had moved from D.C., showed up at Sovereign House, he noticed a girl across the room named Darby. He didn’t ask her out that night. But when Joe and Darby started dating, their origin story was “We locked eyes at Sovereign House.” The couple became part of the core crowd. “It’s like our Cheers,” Joe said. Allen purchased a mouse from Petco, christening it Sovereign Mouse, and kept it at the bar; later, Darby took care of it. When the mouse died, a group from Sovereign House buried him in Central Park. This past summer, Joe and Darby got married. Many of the groomsmen and bridesmaids were friends from Sovereign House. A statuette of two mice holding hands adorned the wedding cake.

“When the Old Guard fully rolls over, the fact that we all started as twentysomethings together here and just rode it all the way out—the long-term value will accrue,” the young Trump Administration official told me. Allen said that he’s surprised by how few people recognize the way social scenes materialize into political reality. “You build bonds early,” he said. “You grow up together. And then that’s it.” ♦

Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as Donald Trump? For many people, this was a question asked and definitively answered twenty years ago, when Trump was still a real-estate vulgarian shilling his brand on Howard Stern’s radio show and agreeing with the host’s assessment that his daughter Ivanka was “a piece of ass” and describing how he could “get away with” going backstage at the Miss Universe pageant to see the contestants naked.

Or, perhaps, his character came clear a decade later, during his first run for the Presidency, when he said of John McCain, who spent more than five years being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” This was from a man who avoided the war with four student deferments and a medical deferment for bone spurs in his heel. Larry Braunstein, a podiatrist in Jamaica, Queens, who provided Trump with this timely diagnosis, in the fall of 1968, rented his office from Fred Trump, Donald’s father. One of the late doctor’s daughters told the Times, “I know it was a favor.”

One day, a historian will win a contract to assemble the collected quotations of the forty-fifth and forty-seventh President—all the press-room rants, the Oval Office put-downs, the 3 A.M. Truth Social fever dreams. The early chapters will include: “Blood coming out of her—wherever.” “Horseface.” “Fat pig.” “Suckers.” “Losers.” “Enemies of the people.” “Pocahontas.” And then the volume will move on to “Piggy.” “Things happen.” And so on.

After a decade of constant presence on the political stage, Trump no longer seems capable of shocking anyone with the brutality of his language or the heedlessness of his behavior. His supporters continue to excuse his insouciant cruelty as “Trump being Trump,” proof of his authenticity. (The antisemitism of Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and a gaggle of group-chatting young Republican leaders is, similarly, included in the “big tent” of MAGA rhetoric.) Now, when a friend begins a conversation with “Did you hear what Trump said today?,” you do your best to dodge the subject. What’s the point? And yet the President really did seem to break through to a new level of degradation this week.

This past weekend brought a terrible and rapid succession of violent events. On Saturday afternoon, in Providence, an unidentified gunman on the Brown University campus shot and killed two students and wounded nine others in the midst of exam period. The killer has yet to be found. On Sunday, in Archer Park, near Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, a father-and-son team, both dressed in black and heavily armed, reportedly took aim at a crowd of Jewish men, women, and children who were celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. At least fifteen people were killed, including an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor and a ten-year-old girl. The massacre was the latest in a long series of antisemitic incidents in Australia—and beyond.

Finally, on Sunday night, came the news that the actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, had been found dead in their home. Their bodies were discovered by their daughter Romy. Los Angeles police arrested their son, the thirty-two-year-old Nick Reiner. According to press reports, the investigation had focussed on him immediately not only because of his history of drug abuse but also because he had been behaving erratically the night before, in his parents’ presence, at a holiday party at the home of Conan O’Brien. Nick Reiner is being held, without bail, in Los Angeles County jail.

There was something about these three events that came in such rapid succession that it savaged the spirit—the yet-again regularity of American mass shootings, this time in Providence; the stark Jew hatred behind the slaughter in Australia; the sheer sadness of losing such a beloved and decent figure in the popular culture, and his wife, purportedly at the hands of their troubled son. It would be naïve to think that any leader, any clergy, could ease all that pain with a gesture or a speech. Barack Obama speaking and singing “Amazing Grace” from the pulpit in Charleston, South Carolina, or Robert F. Kennedy speaking in Indianapolis on the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that kind of moral eloquence is somehow beyond our contemporary imaginations and expectations. What you would not expect is for a President of the United States to make matters even worse than they were. But, of course, he did. A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood,” Trump wrote, on Truth Social, on Monday. He went on:

Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.

He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

There is a lot to unpack here, from the shaky grammar to the decorous use of “passed away” to the all-caps diagnosis to the hideously gleeful sign-off: “rest in peace!” Future Trump scholars will sort through the details with the necessary deliberation. But it requires no deep thinking to assess Trump’s meaning. As if to assure the country that this was no passing case of morning dyspepsia, he declared, at a press conference, later in the day (using the kingly third-person approach) that Reiner “was a deranged person, as far as Trump is concerned.”

In the wake of the shocking death of Charlie Kirk, in September, there were many in the President’s circle who were quick to insist on the proper language of tragedy and mourning, and to ostracize those who failed to use it. As a citizen and an ardent liberal, Reiner was a harsh critic of the President; nor did his politics even remotely align with those of Charlie Kirk. Yet, when Reiner was asked about Kirk’s murder, he called it “an absolute horror,” and told Piers Morgan, “That should never happen to anybody. I don’t care what your political beliefs are.” And, when Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, delivered a speech of forgiveness at her husband’s memorial service in Arizona, Reiner was moved. “What she said, to me, was beautiful,” he said. “She forgave his assassin, and I think that is admirable.”

Remember what the President said by way of reply to Erika Kirk’s gesture of Christian love? “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” And he said this in a eulogy. And so it is worth asking, do you know anyone quite as malevolent? At your place of work? On your campus? A colleague? A teacher? Much less someone whose impulses and furies in no small measure dictate the direction, fate, and temper of the country? Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as Donald Trump? ♦

Happy Na’vi families are all alike; every unhappy Na’vi family is unhappy in its own way. Should you require proof, simply drain your bladder, don your 3-D glasses, and settle in for the very long haul of James Cameron’s new movie, “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” Here, once again, are Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), both looking bluer than usual. They are Na’vi—cerulean-skinned, feline-bodied humanoid giants, who dwell on a distant moon called Pandora, fly hither and yon on what appear to be tie-dyed pterodactyls, and possess long, braided ponytails that allow them to connect with nature and each other. But Jake and Neytiri are in no mood for hookups. They are grieving the loss of their eldest son, Neteyam, who was slain, at the end of “Avatar: The Way of Water” (2022), by mercenary human invaders, bent on seizing control of Pandora and its natural resources. Now, as “Fire and Ash” gets under way, Jake tries to move on, but Neytiri remains inconsolable, her grief hardening into rage. Their younger son, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), shoulders a heavy burden of guilt over his brother’s death.

So far, so straightforward: it’s “Ordi’Na’vi People.” But complications loom, and really, they have loomed from the start. Back in the year 2154, Jake was still human himself—a U.S. marine, enlisted by scientists to infiltrate life in the Pandoran jungle, using an artificially engineered, human-piloted Na’vi body. So began “Avatar” (2009), a technologically newfangled but dramatically old-fashioned epic of going native, which ended with Jake fully radicalized, blissfully bonded to Neytiri, and granted the permanent gift of true-blue Na’vi form. “The Way of Water,” set roughly fifteen years later, whisked us from Pandora’s jungles to its ocean shores, and introduced us to Jake and Neytiri’s children. These include an adopted teen-age daughter, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who was born, under mysterious circumstances, to the Na’vi avatar of a now deceased human scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (also Sigourney Weaver). This anomaly may explain why, in “Fire and Ash,” Kiri alone has trouble communicating with the spirit of the Great Mother, also known as Enya—sorry, Eywa—and cherished for the way she flows through and binds all Pandoran life, presumably in one great ponytail-palooza.

The family also has a foster ragamuffin, Spider (Jack Champion), who loves nothing more than to frolic through the wilderness with Lo’ak, Kiri, and their younger sister, Tuk (Trinity Bliss), but who, being human, cannot breathe the Pandoran atmosphere, and so must wear an oxygen mask that can be counted on to malfunction at the least convenient moments. More awkwardly still, he is the biological son of Jake’s slain adversary, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who died when the boy was still an itsy-bitsy Spider, but whose consciousness now lives on as a malevolent packet of memories implanted in a powerful Na’vi body. Pure gung-ho dickishness in any form, Quaritch 2.0 is determined to have his revenge on Jake and, perhaps, a belated shot at fatherhood. To that end, he teams up with a ferocious rebel clan of Na’vi known as the Mangkwan, or Ash People, who are bent on Eywa’s destruction; in keeping with their name and their blazing red plumage, they just want to burn everything down. Quaritch promises them access to firearms, in flagrant defiance of Pandora’s unwritten anti-gun laws.

Got all that? Good. “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is many things: a lengthy demo reel for the latest sophistications in performance-capture technology, for which we can credit the ever more lifelike quality of the Na’vi characters, and the third chapter in a blockbuster mega-franchise that—if Cameron had his way, an unlimited budget, and perhaps a packet of memories and a Na’vi body himself—would stretch on toward infinity. But the movie is also, perhaps first and foremost, a goofily complicated maelstrom of transmigratory souls, cross-species lineages, and unholy alliances. Gone are the simpler days of the first “Avatar,” an anti-imperialist war flick whose moral lines were as clean-cut as Jake’s marine ’do.

Now human conquest feels like a more insidious, more entangled thing. It goes beyond the hostile occupying presence of military forces, commanded by General Ardmore (Edie Falco), who are easily dispatched, in the film’s ocean-battle sequences, with a mighty wave of Cameron’s digital wand. “Fire and Ash” is a largely enervating experience, but, like its predecessors, it sure knows how to get us crying out for our own species’ blood. At the director’s command, lethal squid-like monsters attack Ardmore’s ships from out of nowhere, and sombrely eloquent sea creatures, known as Tulkun, abruptly shift into killer-whale mode. Far more difficult to shake off, though, are the profound emotional, spiritual, and cellular bonds that have developed between the human and Na’vi worlds. Witness the scene in which Kiri, trying to save Spider from toxic asphyxiation, tethers his fate to Pandora’s in ways that portend only more human encroachment to come. The series, in short, has become one long parable of intragalactic miscegenation—a concept that Cameron pushes, in one primally deranged sequence, to Old Testament levels of reckoning.

More than once, during a deadly confrontation, Jake tells Quaritch to open his yellow Na’vi eyes, look past their petty squabbles, and see how vast and beautiful the world around him is. But “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” for all its heady complications, is an altogether less transporting experience than its two predecessors, though, at three hours and fifteen minutes, it is certainly vaster. What it lacks is a sense of passage, of progress from one world to the next, which even the cinema of non-stop sensations requires. Cameron (usually) knows this as well as anyone. That’s why the first “Avatar” ushered us, with a boldly immersive application of 3-D, into what felt like a startling new plane of existence: our first glimpse of the Pandoran wilderness, with Jake roaming about clumsily on his new Na’vi legs, evoked nothing so much as Dorothy’s first Technicolor glimpse of Munchkinland in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), famously the director’s favorite film. “The Way of Water,” though unable to match the impact of the first “Avatar,” shrewdly took us deep-sea diving instead, in the great Cameron tradition of “The Abyss” (1989) and “Titanic” (1997). Talk about reefer madness: the depths were gorgeously enveloping, and the fish were a trippy hoot.

“Fire and Ash,” by contrast, has no new worlds to conquer. There are a few eye-candy wonders, to be sure, such as a fleet of Na’vi hot-air balloons, each one equipped with a bulbous, translucent envelope and a mass of trailing medusa tentacles. There is also Varang (Oona Chaplin), the Mangkwan’s cold-blooded leader, a seething, witchily seductive spectacle unto herself. The rest of it treads and retreads water. An interminable sequence of detention, escape, and pursuit unfolds at the humans’ heavily fortified compound, and although the man-made ugliness is partly the point—what a depressing contrast with the magnificently verdant jungle visions, the luminescent flora and fauna of the Na’vi world!—it is also, in this case, a trigger and possibly a manifestation of boredom.

Presumably, Cameron has a long-term destination in mind, but here, falling back on the habitual flatness of his characterizations and the self-admiring wretchedness of his dialogue (“Smile, bitches!” is what passes for a putdown), he almost seems to be stalling for time. Will the planned next films in the cycle offer a shot at redemption? With each outing, it has become increasingly clear that Jake is, in fact, an avatar for Cameron himself, who went full Na’vi ages ago and may never come back—and, stuck as he is, can only hope to convert willing audiences to the cause. He has committed years of his life to the “Avatar” project, and, at seventy-one, he soldiers on, like a filmmaker possessed or just plain trapped. Pandora’s boxed him in. ♦

Welcome to Needle & Monk, Brooklyn’s newest Japanese-style vinyl listening bar. This is not “just another bar hidden behind a secret door inside a Bushwick haberdashery.” This is a sanctuary for sound, a cathedral of crackle, a temple devoted to the art of shutting up and listening to a record properly for once in your life.

Below are a few simple guidelines to insure that everyone’s experience remains as spiritually transcendent as possible.

Entry Requirements
Bring a valid I.D., three references, and your Discogs wish list—if it is deemed acceptable, you can come in.

Keep Your Voice Down
You may murmur—but softly, as in a morning sunrise. If I can distinguish words beyond reverent muttering, you will be escorted to the Whispering Corner, where a framed photo of Bill Evans will silently judge you.

Phones Will Be Checked at the Bar
No photos, no videos, no Shazaming. If you must know a track, raise your hand at the end of the side, and I will write it down for you with a fountain pen on a small slip of paper. You will frame it when you get home.

No Requests
The music is curated, not crowdsourced. This is not a jukebox. This is a journey. If you approach the d.j. booth and utter the phrase “Do you take requests?” you will be handed earplugs and told to meditate in silence.

Remain Seated
You may get up to use the rest room, but only between sides. During songs, please remain still. Any movement above shoulder level will be interpreted as dance and is strictly forbidden.

Order Quietly
When ordering a drink, simply make eye contact with the bartender and mouth the word “whiskey.” If your lips make a sound, you will receive a twenty-three-dollar artisanal water.

Do Not Touch the Records
In fact, don’t even look at them. The vinyl is for ears only. Before you exit, you will be asked to leave your fingerprints on a first-press copy of “Aja” so that we can identify you later, if need be.

Respect the Sound System
Our speakers were handcrafted by a monk in Kyoto who has never known laughter. Each one took twelve years to complete and costs more than your car. If you rest your drink on the subwoofer, the staff will remove you with a comically large hook.

Limit Your Party Size
Two is a crowd. Three is chaos. Four might as well be Bonnaroo. If your group exceeds one person, we will assign you all to a corner of the room with headphones and play “Journey in Satchidananda” at the wrong speed as you reflect on your choices.

Dress Appropriately
We ask guests to dress in “vinyl formal” wear. This means: dark tones, clean lines, and nothing that rustles. Corduroy is banned. Denim may be permitted if raw. Fleece will be burned.

Handle Emotions with Dignity
If the music moves you to tears—and it will—please let them fall silently onto your coaster. If you feel compelled to sing along, you will be offered a small wooden flute and asked to play it outside.

We Do Not Serve Food
Chewing is the enemy of hearing. Hunger only for the next modal-chord change.

End of the Night Ritual
When the final record spins out, everyone must rise, bow their heads toward the turntable, and whisper in unison, “Thank you for your service.” Only then may you retrieve your phones and reënter the digital wasteland.

Final Caveat
Should you violate three or more of the above, you will be sentenced to forty-eight hours in our Isolation Lounge, where only “The Very Best of Ed Sheeran” plays—on Spotify (not Premium), over Bluetooth, through a single AirPod.

Thank you for visiting Needle & Monk, where silence is golden, vinyl is sacred, and talking is violence. ♦

What makes a great performance? In the past, we might have said that it expresses something ineffably, thrillingly human, but our current dystopia seems determined to press the point. This year, the company Particle6 unveiled the A.I.-generated “actress” Tilly Norwood, a fresh-faced brunette who was reportedly “seeking representation” in Hollywood. Why a synthetic creation would need an agent to take a cut of its earnings is anyone’s guess, but Tilly’s big début sent the industry into its latest paroxysm. That, along with other A.I. experiments, such as the garishly magnified version of “The Wizard of Oz” at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, raised the question: Will the performances of the future even be human? At times, even flesh-and-blood acting had an uncanny-valley quality. Ryan Murphy’s legal drama “All’s Fair” stars Kim Kardashian (as Tilly Norwood-ish a human being as we have) alongside such talents as Glenn Close, Niecy Nash, and Naomi Watts—all reduced to what seemed like hollow simulacra of themselves.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

I bring up these worst performances to throw the best ones into relief. Somehow, in an entertainment industry increasingly drawn to the artificial, actual people did extraordinary things, whether on the big screen, on the small screen, on a stage, or in a recording studio. The following list spans genres, from period drama to existential sci-fi, from animation to documentary. Some of these performers are matinée idols, while others are offbeat character actors who found the perfect vehicle for their idiosyncrasies. One of them has been dead for two years. The caveats: I couldn’t fit everyone I loved, and I certainly haven’t seen everything. But these ten performances (plus the honorably mentioned) made indelible marks on our culture, and on me.

The antic Apple TV comedy stars Rogen as Matt Remick, the frazzled head of the fictitious Continental Studios. Remick is a cinephile who nevertheless finds himself green-lighting a Kool-Aid movie and screwing over the auteurs he reveres. Rogen, who directed the series with Evan Goldberg, brings a beleaguered panic to the role, but at its heart is disillusionment: the modern studio head is less a dashing impresario in the Robert Evans mold than an impotent middle manager, doomed to massage egos and churn out I.P.-driven schlock. Some critics found “The Studio” too mild as Hollywood satire, but I’d argue that it’s less satire than farce, with Rogen—who has evolved nicely from stoner doofus to middle-aged neurotic—leading a pack of expert clowns, including Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz, and Catherine O’Hara. I’d watch him do commedia dell’arte—maybe Carlo Goldoni’s “The Servant of Two Masters”?

Honorable mention: “The Studio” is stuffed with great cameos (Sarah Polley, Zoë Kravitz), but the most surprising might be from Martin Scorsese, in the pilot episode, showing the unlikely comic chops he’s revealed in his daughter Francesca’s TikTok videos. For more of Marty as himself, see Rebecca Miller’s five-part docuseries “Mr. Scorsese.”

Photograph from Everett

Stone was on my list in 2023, the year she gave two discomfiting comic performances, in the Showtime series “The Curse” and in the Yorgos Lanthimos film “Poor Things.” After winning her second Best Actress Oscar, for the latter, she teamed up with Lanthimos again in this dark-comic adaptation of the South Korean flick “Save the Green Planet!” Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceuticals C.E.O. abducted by a conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons) who thinks she’s an alien in disguise. Is she? Stone is utterly convincing as a steely girlboss, but her performance is laced with enough strangeness to keep us guessing. Fuller couldn’t be further from the guileless, pleasure-seeking woman-child Stone played in “Poor Things,” but she’s proven that she has the range to match her daring, uningratiating choices. As a producer, of “Bugonia” and other projects, she’s just as canny.

Honorable mention: In the long-awaited second season of “Severance,” another eerie, sci-fi-inflected take on corporate malevolence, Britt Lower returned as the defiant “innie” Helly R., but we also got to know her “outie,” Helena Eagan—like Fuller, a C-suite ice queen with a knack for manipulation.

Playing father and son, Graham and Cooper anchored this bracing Netflix miniseries, about a sweet-looking thirteen-year-old in Yorkshire who is arrested for the murder of a female classmate. Cooper, who was fourteen and unknown when he filmed the show, revealed his character’s manosphere-addled psyche by terrifying degrees. Graham, who created the series with Jack Thorne, was equally riveting as the salt-of-the-earth dad who goes from defiantly protective to haunted by the violence he missed brewing within his own son. Because each of the four episodes was filmed in one continuous shot, Graham’s and Cooper’s performances required an unusual level of technical and emotional prowess. Both won Emmys, as did Erin Doherty, as a forensic psychologist out of her depth.

Honorable mention: Doherty’s win was well-deserved, but I was rooting for Jenny Slate, who shone in another limited series, FX’s “Dying for Sex,” as a woman whose best friend (Michelle Williams) has terminal cancer. Slate drew on her standup-comedy kookiness to create a grounded portrait of platonic love and the strain of caretaking.

Hot off “Succession,” Snook stormed Broadway in Kip Williams’s one-woman adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel. “One-woman” might be a misnomer, actually; while Snook did play twenty-six characters—all expertly delineated by accent, costume, and demeanor—she was joined by a hive of crew members doing complicated camera work. Sometimes Snook was onstage in the flesh and projected on screens at once, playing opposite herself, like a Victorian hall of mirrors. This allowed her to show off her skills as a stage performer, alongside the sly closeup work we know from her years as Shiv Roy—all while spitting out Wilde’s prose with motormouthed alacrity. Having won an Olivier for her performance on the West End, Snook handily took home a Tony Award.

Honorable mention: Elsewhere on Broadway, Jonathan Groff is playing Bobby Darin in the bio-musical “Just in Time,” only a year after his Tony-winning performance in “Merrily We Roll Along.” The musical is also not a solo show, but it rests on Groff’s capable shoulders. Singing “Mack the Knife” and “Splish Splash,” he’s absolutely croon-worthy.

Photograph courtesy Warner Bros.

Is there any challenge for an actor more delicious than playing identical twins? In Ryan Coogler’s vampire blockbuster, Jordan plays brothers nicknamed Smoke and Stack, who open up a juke joint in Jim Crow-era Mississippi and are set upon by soul suckers. Jordan infused his dual role—the practical Smoke and the wily Stack—with subtle variations on his megawatt charisma, clearly relishing the task. He’s both dapper and sleazy, heroic and menacing, laid back and full of fight. Like Stone and Lanthimos, he and Coogler have enjoyed a long collaboration, dating back to their breakout film, “Fruitvale Station,” in 2013, and continuing through “Creed” and the “Black Panther” franchise. By now, the director knows how to play his leading man like a fine-tuned instrument—say, a resonator guitar. So why not have two of him?

Honorable mention: In James Sweeney’s “Twinless,” a dark queer drama that made a splash at Sundance, Dylan O’Brien also plays identical twins—one straight and bro-y, one gay and sardonic—with such skill that he really seems like two different actors.

Yes, Reubens died in 2023, and, yes, sitting for a documentary interview may not seem like a performance. But the way that Reubens toyed with the director, Matt Wolf, was as engrossing and layered as any role he’d ever played. By turns revealing and obscuring himself, Reubens would play games with the camera—you never quite knew if he was letting you in or pushing you away—as he narrated his life as Paul, as Pee-wee Herman, and as a pariah. One thing that he didn’t tell Wolf, perhaps owing to his relentless need for control, was that he was dying. In retrospect, Reubens’s looming mortality added one more facet to his half-confessional, half-facetious unburdening. In the end, it was impossible for a cutup like Reubens to sit in front of a camera and not perform for it.

Honorable mention: Also playing himself: Satan, who, by any measure, has had quite a year. But his appearance on the Trump-baiting new episodes of “South Park” was some of his best work yet. This Lord of Darkness is a melancholy beefcake carrying the demon spawn of his neglectful lover, President Trump, a rebound from his previous boyfriend, Saddam Hussein. Poor lug!

Photograph by Agata Grzybowska / Everett

What Buckley is asked to do in Chloé Zhao’s film, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, would make any actor blanch. Buckley plays Agnes Hathaway, who becomes the wife of William Shakespeare and then loses their eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, to the plague. Summoning a mother’s grief is daunting enough, but Buckley’s remarkable performance also includes scenes of mystical communion with nature (Agnes is said to be the daughter of a forest witch), courtship with Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare, and harrowing childbirth. The film’s climax, at a performance of “Hamlet” at the Globe, rests on Buckley’s face, as open and anguished as a wound. The Irish actress, who has stunned in films such as “The Lost Daughter” and “Women Talking,” is now the frontrunner in this year’s Best Actress race. (She also reads the audiobook of O’Farrell’s novel.)

Honorable mention: As another mother cleaved from her child, Teyana Taylor brought spunk and eroticism to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” as the revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills. The shot of her popping off a machine gun, pregnant belly exposed, may be the year’s defining screen image. Even after she disappears, she haunts the rest of the movie.

Photograph by Kevin Mazur / Getty

I didn’t get to see Bad Bunny’s tour live, for good reason: the Latin-trap superstar pointedly skipped the mainland United States, out of concern that his fans would be subject to immigration raids. Instead, he took up a thirty-one-show residency at Puerto Rico’s largest indoor arena. The concerts electrified the battered island where Bad Bunny was born and served as a sharp rebuke to Trump’s America, with the artist in a straw pava hat, flanked by drummers and revellers on a lush, grassy set. My colleague Kelefa Sanneh went to see the show there in August and described the artist as “the person future generations will point to when they talk about what the early twenty-twenties sounded like.” The rest of us had to make do with an Amazon livestream, or with his hosting gig on “Saturday Night Live.” Next year, he headlines the Super Bowl halftime show, whether the Trump Administration likes it or not.

Honorable mention: Hell hath no fury like a pop artist scorned. Witness Lily Allen, whose new album, “West End Girl,” came on the heels of her breakup with the actor David Harbour. In catchy, deceptively mellow pop, Allen catalogues heartbreaks and betrayals—the image of a Duane Reade bag filled with butt plugs and lube is not one we’ll soon forget.

Years after playing John Carter on “ER,” Wyle returned with another medical drama, on HBO Max, as Michael Robinavitch, known at the Pittsburgh hospital where he works as Dr. Robby. To see the bumbling young Carter morph into the world-weary, aggrieved Dr. Robby—still shell-shocked by his mentor’s death during the depths of COVID—had undeniable poignancy. (The series’ resemblance to “ER” has become a matter of legal dispute.) During the course of fifteen episodes, each of which tracked an hour of an eventful day at an under-resourced emergency room, Dr. Robby’s stress and compassion and sorrow played out over Wyle’s face, with its hard-earned lines and strikingly forked nose. Wyle showed us the burdens that hospital workers are asked to bear, navigating life and death and trying not to sink under the weight of it all.

Honorable mention: “The Pitt” wouldn’t have worked without its sprawling, sterling ensemble, but I was particularly moved by Taylor Dearden, as Dr. Melissa King, a brainy, sensitive soul who has a sister with autism and is neurodivergent herself. (Dearden is the daughter of Bryan Cranston—who was also brilliant on “The Studio.”)

Photograph courtesy A24

In recent years, Chalamet has claimed his throne as the king of Christmas, playing the likes of Bob Dylan and Willy Wonka in big holiday releases. This month, he’s back as another talented jerk, the scrappy, swaggering table-tennis champion at the center of Josh Safdie’s A24 film. His character, Marty Mauser, loosely inspired by the Ping-Pong legend Marty Reisman, is a cocky troublemaker who can talk himself out of any jam or into any woman’s bed. He knows how good he is, at table tennis and at seduction, which makes him equally beguiling and insufferable—the street-smart Jewish hero Chalamet was born to play. I saw a press screening, but, if you need your Timmy fix before Christmas, check out the eighteen-minute parody video he put online, in which he baffles the film’s marketing team with deranged promotional ideas.

Honorable mention: In “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a film that shares DNA with “Marty Supreme” (both are high-anxiety A24 movies with several common producers, including Safdie), Rose Byrne plays a harried mother on the edge of implosion—a formidable turn that reinforced the actress’s fearlessness and range. ♦